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Microsoft Azure becomes Magic Quadrant leader in Enterprise iPaaS

Last week the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (EiPaaS) was published, listing Microsoft in the coveted leader space. Having worked with Azure’s iPaaS products for a long time now, I wholeheartedly agree with this decision, and congratulate all the teams within Microsoft who have been working so hard to get to where we are today. The complete report, with all requirements and results can be found in this report.

Source: Gartner (April 2018)

iPaaS on Azure

Looking at the definition of an integration platform as a service, we can see how important this space is in the modern world, where data and system integration is more important than ever.

An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution provides capabilities to enable subscribers (aka “tenants”) to implement data, application, API and process integration projects involving any combination of cloud-resident and on-premises endpoints. This is achieved by developing, deploying, executing, managing and monitoring integration processes/flows that connect multiple endpoints so that they can work together.

Microsoft provides various services which we can use to build a true iPaaS platform, each catering to its own strengths, which can be combined to fit any scenario, like Logic Apps, Service Bus, API Management and more. And in 2018, these services will branded together under the new name Azure Integration Services.

From 2018, Azure Integration Services will be the collective name for a number of integration-related components, including Logic Apps, API Management, Service Bus and Event Grid. Data Factory rounds off the EiPaaS offerings for extraction, transformation and loading (ETL)-type workloads. Microsoft Flow, built on top of Logic Apps, enables citizen integrators.

In my opinion, this is a good move to help customers understand how important it is to have these components working together. Before Azure, integration solutions were often build with only one or two products, like BizTalk or WCF, but nowadays it’s much more important to break down our problem, and check how to solve this using all those services we have access to.

Driving forces

Making it to the leader space wouldn’t have been possible without the great efforts from the Program Managers and their teams, like Dan Rosanova, Jon Fancey, Kevin Lam, Kent Weare, Vlad Vinogradsky, Matt Farmer and all others. These are the true driving forces behind these services, who keep adding new features, bring out new services and keep making the offering ever more awesome.

The other driving force behind the success of Azure and especially the iPaaS offering, I think is the community. By sharing knowledge, giving feedback to the product teams and engaging with new and existing customers, we can and do make a difference. Events like Integrate, the Global Integration Bootcamp, Integration Monday, Middleware Friday and the many user groups and meetups really help in carrying out the message around these great services.

Going forward

Microsoft has been going forward steady, bringing new services like Event Grid and expanding and improving on existing ones like Logic Apps. Looking at where we were two years ago and one year ago, we can see how fast progress is being made, giving us some amazing tools in our daily work. Our customers agree with this as well, as pretty much any new project I do these days is being done with Azure iPaaS, showing how much trust they have in Azure and its services. And bringing together the different services under the Azure Integration Services name will help new customers find their way around more easily. And with that my prediction is, next year Microsoft will have climbed even further in the leader space on the quadrant.